Lars P. Syll

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How would you react if a renowned physicist, say, ​Richard Feynman, was telling you that sometimes force is proportional to acceleration and at other times it is proportional to acceleration squared? I guess you would be unimpressed. But actually, what most mainstream economists do amounts to the same strange thing when it comes to theory development and model modification. In mainstream economic theory,​ preferences are standardly expressed in the form of a utility function....

Les théorèmes d’incomplétude de Gödel  [embedded content]

Om konsten att läsa och skriva Hur ska man läsa? Det är nog en rätt vanlig fundering alla någon gång har haft kring vårt förhållningssätt till litteratur och läsande. Själv får jag anledning fundera kring detta när min älskade — som oförtrutet slukar nya böcker i ett rasande tempo — åter igen försöker övertala mig att ställa tillbaka Röda rummet, Hemsöborna, Martin Bircks ungdom, Den allvarsamma leken, Jerusalem eller Gösta Berlings saga i biblioteket och...

L’Amazonie brûle et Bolsonaro s’en fiche  [embedded content]

Der deutsch-sowjetische Nichtangriffspakt — auch als Hitler-Stalin-Pakt bekannt — wurde am 23. August 1939 unterzeichnet. Der Pakt garantierte dem Deutschen Reich die sowjetische Neutralität bei einer kriegerischen Auseinandersetzung mit den Westmächten. [embedded content]

Rethinking Economics actually gives a pretty good description of the state of modern macroeconomics here. There is a purist streak in economics that wants everything to follow from asumming things like ‘rationality’ and ‘equilibrium.’ That purist streak has given birth to a kind ‘deductivist blindness’ of mainstream economics, something that also to a larger extent explains why it contributes to causing economic crises rather than to solving them. But where does this...

What — if anything — do p-values test? Unless enforced by study design and execution, statistical assumptions usually have no external justification; they may even be quite implausible. As result, one often sees attempts to justify specific assumptions with statistical tests, in the belief that a high p-value or ‘‘nonsignificance’’ licenses the assumption and a low p-value refutes it. Such focused testing is based on a meta-assumption that every other...

Econometrics and the problem of unjustified assumptions There seems to be a pervasive human aversion to uncertainty, and one way to reduce feelings of uncertainty is to invest faith in deduction as a sufficient guide to truth. Unfortunately, such faith is as logically unjustified as any religious creed, since a deduction produces certainty about the real world only when its assumptions about the real world are certain … Unfortunately, assumption uncertainty...

Pourquoi un changement de direction théorique est nécessaire Il y a une certaine tendance française à attribuer à l’utilisation des mathématiques les difficultés des modèles à expliquer les phénomènes économiques … Pour moi, le problème ne réside pas dans l’utilisation des méthodes formelles mais plutôt dans une obsession poussant à améliorer et même à perfectionner des modèles qui semblent être totalement détachés de la réalité. Comme Robert Solow l’a...